by Greg Iles
“I think you’re exaggerating my importance.”
“Bullshit! The FBI doesn’t have much to work with, and they won’t drop this angle until they understand it. Tell me the truth about the arguments, and if it’s innocent, I’ll tell them to leave you the hell alone.”
Smith closes his eyes, takes a long breath, then expels it slowly and opens his eyes again. The look in them tells me this man does not easily grant trust. “You give me your word not to reveal this to the FBI if it’s not relevant to the case?”
“Christ, you want me to pinky-swear? I’m not telling them anything they don’t need to know to help my sister. I don’t even like them. But they’re the only hope those women and their families have.”
Smith sighs and looks over at the old slave quarters that form one wall of his garden. A faint scent of lemon drifts into my nostrils.
“It’s simple,” he says. “Roger wants me to kill him.”
A rush of heat passes over my face. “What?”
“His disease is steadily worsening. It’s in his lungs now, and his other vital organs. The end will be . . . unpleasant. He wants my help when the time comes.”
I feel like slinking away in shame. Suddenly everything is clear, Wheaton’s reticence most of all. If the artist’s wish to have Frank Smith help end his life became known to the NOPD, that might stop Smith from risking his freedom to comply, no matter where his sympathies lie.
“You get it now?” asks Smith.
“Part of it. But why the arguments? You refused to help him?”
“That’s right. I thought Roger might be motivated by clinical depression. I thought he had a lot of great paintings left in him. I still think so.” Smith gives me a weary look, as though concealing the truth is no longer worth the effort. “But he’s wearing me down, honestly. He’s shown me his medical records, not to mention his body, and I’m starting to understand how grave his situation is. Assisted suicide will get you ten years in this state, so it’s not a decision I can make lightly.”
“I understand.”
Smith looks skeptical. “Do you?”
An awful flash of memory lights my mind. “I once saw an Afghan guerrilla ask his brother to kill him to keep him from being captured. He’d been wounded during a raid on a Russian outpost. It was total confusion, people running around in the dark, Russian soldiers screaming, Afghans howling curses, and this poor half-starved guy shot in the hip. He couldn’t walk, and they couldn’t carry him through the mountains. He begged his brother to end it for him, but the brother couldn’t do it. The others huddled beside the trail and talked; the Russians were getting closer; finally a cousin went back and cut the guy’s throat while the others prayed. I heard the cousin sobbing as we climbed back into the mountains.”
“What an encouraging story.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just . . . I know it’s a hard thing. How did he want you to help him? Did he have a method in mind?”
“How could it help you to know that?”
“I don’t know. I’m curious, I guess.”
“Insulin.”
“Insulin?”
“It’s a peaceful way to go, he says. He’s researched it. Sleep, coma, then death. The problem is that sometimes you don’t die. You just get brain damage.”
“That’s why he needed your help?”
“Yes. He wanted me to find some drug that would stop his heart after the coma. This was after I told him I wasn’t putting a plastic bag over his head and watching him turn blue.”
“Jesus. Okay. I’ll tell the FBI they’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Thank you.” Smith forces a smile. “Would you like something to drink now? Coffee? A Bloody Mary?”
“I could use a drink, but I should go.” I stand and gather up the transmitter, microphone, and sticky tape.
“Look, the Jefferson Parish sheriff leaked to the media that we have suspects. He didn’t name names, but you might want to get ready for that. Get a hotel room or something.”
Smith shakes his head in exasperation. “I’ll do that. Right after I call my lawyer and tell him to get ready to sue the shit out of the government.”
He stands, takes my arm, then leads me back through the house. As we pass the dining room, I glance in at his nude portrait of Oscar Wilde.
“I really like that picture.”
“Thanks.”
Smith reaches for the doorknob, but I stop him by pulling my arm against my side. “Frank, tell me one thing. The brush hairs led the FBI to four suspects: you, Roger, Thalia, and Gaines. Thalia’s out. If you had to pin it on Wheaton or Gaines, who would you pick?”
“Are you kidding? Was Leon under surveillance when Thalia was taken?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Well. Roger too, of course?”
“Yes.” A last, desperate thought pops into my head. “Has Wheaton ever told you he was abused as a child?”
Smith sighs angrily.
“I have a good reason for asking, I promise.”
“He never told me anything like that. And if your next question is did I suffer anything like that, my answer is fuck you. All right?” He yanks open the door and stands clear of it. “Come again soon, now.”
I walk out into the pale sunlight and damp yellow leaves of Esplanade, and the door closes behind me. It’s been a long time since I felt this low. Probing private lives has never been my thing. All photojournalism is essentially exploitative, but in photography the act of invasion is mitigated by the wonderful speed of light, which lets you intrude from a distance. No messy questions or awkward silences; just click, click, click.
I turn toward the Mississippi River and start to walk, knowing that the FBI sedan bearing Baxter, Lenz, and John will come alongside at any moment. They’ll be pissed that I pulled the wire, which is fine. I’m pissed that I’ve played the role of pawn in their dead-end investigation. I’d probably feel different if this morning’s interviews had produced a lead, but they didn’t.
The quiet hum of a motor announces my escorts. The sedan pulls up to the curb on my left and, when I don’t stop, keeps pace as I walk. Baxter rolls down the passenger window, and I see Special Agent Wendy Travis driving the car. Her presence tells me John is tied up for the day, that I’m to be left under her watchful eyes yet again.
“Why did you kill the wire?” asks Baxter.
“You know why,” I reply, looking straight ahead.
“What did he tell you?”
“He convinced me that Wheaton’s visits there have nothing to do with the case.”
Baxter glances into the backseat, where Lenz sits beside John. Then he looks back at me. “Do you think you’re the best judge of that?”
“As good as any of you.”
He turns to the backseat again, and I’m certain he’s telling John to use his influence to get me to talk. Baxter may not like me being involved with his old profiler, but he doesn’t mind exploiting the connection. I hope John knows better than to try.
The car stops, the back door opens, and John gets out. He walks to me, his eyes filled with concern.
“What do you want to do?” he asks softly. “Whatever you say, I’ll make it happen.”
“I want to walk.”
“You want company?”
“No.”
“You feel that Wheaton and Smith are both innocent, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’m going to go back to the office and study the aerial photos of the courtyards. Call if you want to talk. Wendy has a cell phone.”
I’m going to have company after all.
John squeezes my forearm, then motions to Wendy, who gets out wearing her usual Liz Claiborne skirt and jacket combo, the jacket there to hide her pistol. I resist the urge to say something smart; she’s only doing her job as best she can. She falls into step a couple of yards behind me, and the sedan pulls forward and then passes us. As it recedes, I see John looking back at me over the rear seat, his eyes unreadable.
20
AS I WALK along the oak-shaded sidewalk of Esplanade, Agent Wendy trailing a few yards behind, my mind swirls with images I have no desire to ponder, and my stomach roils with the low-level nausea I’ve felt since Dr. Lenz badgered Roger Wheaton into telling us his disease rendered him impotent years ago. Frank Smith’s revelation of Wheaton’s plea for euthanasia only made it worse. The impact of my shoes against the sidewalk offers a metronomic distraction from those thoughts, so I focus my mind on that.
From Esplanade I turn onto Royal Street, which farther on becomes the center of the antique trade in the Quarter, but here on the downriver end it’s a peaceful lane of homes and shuttered warehouses. I spent a good deal of time walking this grid of streets when I moved here at seventeen, getting to know a world at once seamier and more exotic than the provincial one I left in north Mississippi. Two decades later the sights, smells, and sounds are the same. Ornate wrought-iron balconies laden with ferns and flags climb the faces of pastel buildings, not so bright as those in the Caribbean, but festive in their stately way; the aromas of baking bread and simmering gumbo drift from the direction of St. Philip Street; and shouted cries of the urban New Orleans pa tois collide with rapid precise French spoken by tourists standing on the corner of Ursulines.
Just three blocks to my left, beyond Decatur Street and the levee, rolls the Mississippi River, where great ships bob higher than the roofs of the buildings. I feel myself drawn toward it, but since the water is blocked by the wharf at the end of Ursulines, I stay on Royal, walking at a native’s clip. My inner ear confirms what I have long known, that I am below sea level, walking in a world that exists only provisionally, that a hurricane making landfall here would spill the lake and the river into the Quarter like a great bowl and cover everything from the Lucky Dog men to the tourist traps of Bourbon Street, leaving only cathedral spires, Andy Jackson on his horse, and screeching gulls circling the electrical towers.
At St. Philip I break left, making for the river. Wendy’s flats go staccato as she moves to keep pace with me. The sound of a slide guitar jangles from the doorway of the Babylon Club, and with every step the Quarter grows more commercial. There are restaurants and pubs now, lawyers’ offices, small hotels. Yet still the odd doorway leads down a tunnel that opens onto a secluded courtyard, beckoning with the promise of midnight trysts and masked soirees. I shudder in sudden awareness that the Sleeping Women may have been painted in one of these courtyards. How strange to know that last night, while the people down here drank and laughed and loved and slept, government planes crisscrossed the sky above, shooting thermal images of the buildings, searching for a garden private enough in which to paint a dead woman without interruption.
Joan of Arc awaits me at the Place de France, a little concrete island in the traffic. She sits high on a golden horse, holding a golden flag against the gray clouds, an imperfect monument to a woman who overstepped what those in power saw as her place; an honest monument would show her burning at the stake. Wendy moves alongside me here, for suddenly we are awash in a sea of humanity, surging waves of tourists and cars and French Market merchants hawking vegetables, coffee, and strange souvenirs. I can smell the river now, a muddy, fetid scent on the cool air. Slipping between two fat cream-colored columns, I trot up some flagstone steps, and then I’m looking over a narrow parking lot at the levee and the booms of a freighter whose red-painted waterline floats at the level of my eyes.
“Where are we going?” asks Wendy.
“The river. There’s a walkway on the levee, across the streetcar tracks.”
“I know. The Moonwalk.”
She stays at my shoulder as I march to the little streetcar stop at Dumaine, then cross over the tracks and climb to the brick walkway atop the levee. The river is wide here, and the water high for this time of year, a gray-brown flood separating New Orleans from Algiers. Push-boats and tugs churn across the water at surprising speed, gulls dipping and diving around them. We walk toward Jackson Square, and in the distance I see the hotels and department stores of Canal Place, the old Trade Mart building, the Aquarium of the Americas, and the twin bridges arching across to the west bank.
We’re not alone on the walkway. There are tourists with cameras, joggers wearing headphones, buskers with open guitar cases full of change, and restless bums trying to catch the eyes of passersby, searching for likely marks. As we approach and pass each, I feel Wendy tense beside me, then slowly relax.
Below us on the right lie the streetcar tracks and the parking lot that runs the length of the Quarter; to our left the levee slopes twenty-five feet toward the water, an earthen wall lined with riprap, the heavy gray rocks the Corps of Engineers uses for erosion control. Driftwood clogs the riprap at water’s edge, and every forty yards or so stands a fisherman with a cane pole or rod, hoping for a catfish or a gar.
“Wendy, do you remember the big scandal about FBI lab people giving false evidence testimony? Dummying up results to give prosecutors what they needed?”
“Yes,” she says in an inquisitive tone.
“Wasn’t it proved that a lot of the Bureau’s high-tech forensic tests weren’t half as accurate as claimed?”
“In some cases. But Louis Freeh made it a priority to correct all that. You’re thinking about the sable brush hairs?”
“I’m wondering if the four people we’ve been badgering are tied to this case in any way at all.”
“The lab wasn’t aiming for some known result in this case, Jordan. They just came up with a rare type and lot of brush hair, and one of the few places that lot went was New Orleans.”
Her answer is solid, and that reassures me a little. I can hear myself breathing harder from exertion, but Wendy speaks as though we’re sitting across from each other at lunch.
“I’ve never worked a murder case,” she says. “But I have total faith in John and Mr. Baxter.”
I nod, but my faith is far from complete. Down at water’s edge, a huge bearded man in an overcoat looks up the rocky slope as we walk past. He’s far enough away that Wendy doesn’t tense, but I sense that she could have her gun out in a second or less.
“What was Thalia Laveau like?” she asks.
“Really nice. She had a tough childhood. Her father and cousin sexually abused her.”
“Yuck.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“She was gay?”
“She still is, I hope.”
“God, yes.” Wendy’s face colors. “I didn’t mean that to sound like it did.”
“It’s okay.”
As we walk on, she seems to withdraw into her own thoughts. Then out of the blue she says, “I don’t want to offend you or anything, but I heard during the interview with Laveau, you told her you got raped once. Is that true?”
I feel a flash of temper, knowing the story is probably making the rounds of the field office, but it’s hard to be angry at Wendy, whose curiosity seems part of an eternal quest for self-improvement. “It’s true.”
“I really admire you for speaking up like that, knowing those guys could hear you on the wire.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Does it feel like a long time ago?”
“No.”
She nods. “That’s what I figured.”
“Have you ever had trouble like that?”
“Not that bad. A baseball player got really pushy with me in college once, in the backseat of his car. I waited until he exposed himself, and then I made him regret it.”
“Good for you.”
“Yeah. But something like this, where they snatch you off the street, someone who’s all prepared with a rape kit—”
“We don’t know the victims are being raped,” I remind her.
“Well, right, except for the woman taken from Dori gnac’s.”
A wave of heat comes into my cheeks.
“I shouldn’t assume anything about the others from that,” Wendy goes on. “We don’t know for sure the UNSUB took her.”
/> Her words stop me dead on the walkway. “The woman taken from Dorignac’s grocery was raped?”
Wendy looks confused. “Well, they found semen inside her. She could have just had sex, of course, but I think the opinion of the pathologist was that she was raped.”
As I stand speechless in the wind, a drop of rain touches my face. I had thought the police took DNA samples from the suspects to compare to skin found under the Dorignac’s woman’s fingernails. But they had more than that. And kept it from me. Turning left, I see a gray line of raindrops advancing across the river with the wind, dimpling the waves like soldiers marching over from the Algiers shore.
“I just put my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?” says Wendy. “They didn’t tell you.”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“I guess they didn’t want you to suffer any more than you had to, with your sister and all.”
My rising anger is dwarfed by hurt at John’s betrayal. How could he hold this back from me? But then come images of Jane suffering terror and rape—
“God, I’m in trouble,” Wendy says. But instead of asking me to keep quiet, she says, “They should have told you.”
I turn and continue along the levee despite the rain, which is light and will probably pass quickly, if my memories of New Orleans are accurate.
“You know it’s raining,” says Wendy.
“Yes.”
The tourists and joggers are moving a little faster, but the fishermen stand their ground, knowing the odds favor a quick blowover.
A clattering racket behind us startles Wendy, but it’s only the streetcar. In a few seconds it trundles past us and stops opposite Jackson Square. To our right is the burnt-orange roof of the Café du Monde, and the smell of coffee and frying beignets wafts over the levee, making my mouth water and my stomach ache.
